


A Mind Like Glass

by Kulapti



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Dark Queenie Goldstein, Gen, Legilimency, Manipulative Gellert Grindelwald, Minor Albus Dumbledore/Gellert Grindelwald, Minor Queenie Goldstein/Jacob Kowalski, The best lies have some truth to them, pre-Dark Queenie Goldstein, the pairings are pretty minor in all cases, written pre-Crimes of Grindelwald
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 11:00:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16217651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kulapti/pseuds/Kulapti
Summary: [Written before FB2] There has been speculation that Queenie might have manipulated Jacob into traveling to Europe with her. There has also been speculation that Queenie might end up working with Grindelwald. I wondered how on earth she might begin to consider working with him. Maybe it’s not such a stretch after all.Is it normal for a maniacal supremacist to offer you tea during an interrogation?





	A Mind Like Glass

“Would you like some tea, Miss Goldstein?”

Grindelwald’s pale blue eye catches her attention like a flare in the dark. Queenie looks down and shakes her head so hard it makes her hair bounce. She is so afraid she has passed through normal fear and emerged into an emotion beyond it. The windowless cell she occupies is mostly empty: just a table, two chairs, and Gellert Grindelwald. The chair across from her scrapes on the floor as he sits.

“Coffee, then?”  
She clenches her hands in her lap and shakes her head again.

“I will have some myself,” he says mildly. He leans back in his chair and sighs faintly. She hears the sounds of the teapot filling with water, the clink of the cups. There was no tea set when he entered the room. Grindelwald’s mind feels like a marble, cold and smooth as glass. 

He has her, he has Jacob, and Newt will probably break them out with some unexpectedly bizarre concealed creature or other, but for now it’s very hard to think and not panic. Jacob’s distant mind feels steady but afraid, and her own heart flutters like a trapped bird. This tiny room must be heavily warded. The halls looked empty but she hears the place teeming with people, muffled and blurred like someone tuning a radio in another room. 

Grindelwald says nothing for a long moment. The rich smell of coffee blooms in the tiny room, expensive stuff like what the Director and the President enjoy. What the Director used to enjoy. What Grindelwald enjoys. She’s probably served Grindelwald this very same coffee, sitting in Director Graves’s office in disguise with his impenetrable mind. She cannot hear his thoughts, but she can feel him looking at her. A spoon and saucer clink. She does not look up.

“I find myself in an unusual position, Miss Goldstein,” he says. “Mr. Scamander, I expected. His muggle friend as well. But you…” he pauses thoughtfully. “I don’t know what you want,” he says. His voice lilts as though inviting her to enlighten him, as though this were a casual tea between friends on a café terrace.

She does not answer. He allows the silence to stretch. She won’t look at him, but she thinks he’s sipping his coffee. He’s dangerous, that she knows, and maybe insane. He drowned a man during his latest escape and his followers have killed many more. If he grows impatient with her silence, she wonders if he will use the hot coffee to burn her. Being a delicate-looking woman can protect her for only so long; when she disobeys or disagrees with someone, she prefers to do it while she can hear their thoughts in advance and steer away from the worst of their reactions. The stillness of Grindelwald’s mind unnerves her. She can’t see through his mental barriers at all.

He shifts again in his chair. She looks at a loose thread on one of her coat buttons.

“They tell me you could have escaped,” Grindelwald says, “but you ran towards the others, not away. You were not traveling with Mr. Scamander and MACUSA thinks you are missing. Of all the places in the world you could be, why do I have you here?”

He sounds so calm, almost politely puzzled. She wonders how long she can stay silent before he becomes angry. Powerful men expect to get their own way. She keeps circling back to her fear, not so much of what he could do, but of not knowing what to expect. He could kill her on the spot and she would never hear the thought coming. His spoon and cup clink again. Grindelwald puts more sugar than Mr. Graves, she thinks absurdly. What a meaningless detail to notice at a time like this. Why in Morgana’s name won’t he just skip to the shouting and torturing? Is that not where this is going?

Grindelwald says, “As far as I am concerned, I have no quarrel with you. I could very easily let you go.”

Her heart leaps with a mix of relief and horror. She doesn’t want to leave without Jacob. She won’t, she can’t. It’s her fault he’s here in the first place, her fault he came to Europe, her fault he’s become involved with the world of magic again, and now that Grindelwald has noticed Jacob twice, he’ll surely never be safe again. 

Jacob’s mind is afraid, far away in the cells, afraid but steady like always, so full of light and hope. The terrible smallness of that hope against the vast shadow of Grindelwald’s rumored army…she swallows back tears. Tina had cried in front of this man once, when they still thought he was Graves, and it hadn’t helped her. Queenie assumes it won’t help her, either.

A neatly folded plain handkerchief appears on the table in front of her. How odd. She’s obviously not doing very well concealing her tears. She sniffs and shakes her head, not taking his offering. He sighs again, and for the first time she catches the wisp of his thoughts, a taste of deep weariness.

“I’m not going to poison you with a handkerchief,” he says, and then she hears him properly for the first time. It’s the afterthought behind his words that most people have when they talk, and she grasps at it: How utterly ludicrous it would be to offer tea to a witch and threaten her with a handkerchief, he thinks. The way people react to me based on what they read in the newspapers turns half my conversations into a circus. His mind feels precise, exhausted, and not particularly murderous. Queenie hesitantly takes the handkerchief.

“Will you please tell me what’s going on, Miss Goldstein?” Grindelwald asks politely, after she wipes her eyes. “I don't wanna talk to you,” she says, looking at the table to avoid his gaze. He replies, “Then you can listen. I think there’s more to you than a serving girl.” He pauses significantly. “You were there that night. I remember you.”

The night in the subway, yes, she had been there. She had seen the lightning scorch marks he’d left on the floor. His thoughts blur in and out of her focus, inaudible and then sharp. He hadn’t seen her, she’d thought, because she had barely seen him. And that’s not what he meant, because he says, “I’d wondered which of Scamander’s friends carried that case out of MACUSA. It was perfect, wasn’t it? Nobody would ever suspect a serving girl.”

A fresh wave of fear goes down her back like a spilt glass of ice water, but he sounds amused: satisfied, even. She hasn’t confirmed anything he’s said, but she does hear another little wisp of his thoughts, that he’s pretty sure he’s read her right. He thinks fleetingly of her like a piece on a chessboard, a perfectly timed secret weapon in a well played game. That’s a little frightening too, but less so than the kind of thoughts she’d been expecting to hear. She doesn’t know what to make of him.

He asks, “Why are you so far away from home, traveling with neither your family nor your friends, and yet you end up trapped with them? Why not travel together in the first place?”

He’s traveled alone. So far, and alone. Even a strong purpose can be so tiring if you can’t travel with the people you care about, being separated from the one you— Grindelwald’s thoughts slip back beneath the surface of that smooth impenetrable barrier. Without thinking, she looks at his face, trying to chase the thought she’d heard. 

She finds him looking straight back at her, a satisfied little cat-smile curling his mouth. His eyes are piercing, asymmetrical, brown and blue. He thinks at her as clearly as speech: You can hear me, can’t you?

She recoils a little in surprise. She can see and faintly hear that he’s already read the truth off her face even if she denies it. Just barely within reach, she sees a fragmented memory from his thoughts: summer heat, strong tea, bright blue eyes. “I’ve met someone like you before,” Grindelwald says to Queenie. He’s still smiling, but she can’t quite tell how he feels about it. The person in the memory had been happy, remembered in the bittersweet way she’s read off people thinking of dear friends who have died. Even Grindelwald isn’t made of stone, then. That brief proof of his humanity gives Queenie enough confidence to speak.

“Please,” she pleads, “let Jacob go.”  
“Jacob is the muggle’s name,” he says thoughtfully, perhaps snaring a memory of Jacob’s face out of her thoughts. Queenie pushes on. “He didn’t do anything. He would never have left America if it wasn’t for me.”

“He left for you an not with his friend Mr. Scamander, with whom he has been traveling?” Grindelwald says skeptically. “What do you take me for, Miss Goldstein?”

“Jake didn’t know Newt was here,” Queenie says tightly, gripping her hands in her lap. “He came over with me. It’s all my fault.” Grindelwald leans back in his chair and raises his eyebrows. “Why is it your fault?” Queenie leans forward and rocks back, hunching in on herself. Her voice quavers desperately: “Please, just let him go.”

“Why do you want me to let him go?” Grindelwald asks.  
“I love him,” she answers. She can’t tell what he’s thinking at all but he doesn’t seem impressed, and Queenie wants cry.

“Do you really? So if I let you out, you’ll be back trying to rescue him and giving me grief, is that what you’re telling me?”

Queenie’s instinctive reaction is to deny it, anything to deflect his attention, present or future, but it’s true. She won’t leave without Jacob. Grindelwald can read minds too, not naturally like she can but by practice, certainly. She can feel him listening, a careful cool misty touch skimming just the surface off her thoughts. She can’t lie.

“Please,” she repeats helplessly, “I — I love him. Please let him go.”

“I think you are lying to me,” Grindelwald says, almost like he’s impressed at her nerve. She sits up straighter and starts to protest, but he interrupts her. “If you love him, and he has come to Europe for your sake, then why is he traveling with an English wizard, and not you? Why do you really want me to let him go?”

“No, it’s true,” she gasps.  
“Prove it to me,” he commands, staring into her eyes. 

Prove it? How is she to prove it? She thinks about what people always say in stories — “I’ll do anything you want to save him” — but no, she will not promise to do anything for Grindelwald. This man with his intense, calculating look is like a creature in a fairy tale. He would barter her soul away from her if she lets him. Her only other option is to offer the truth. 

Why would Jacob come to Europe for her but travel without her? Wizardfolk in America have terribly limiting ideas about which people are allowed to love each other. She had enchanted him, just a little, her Jacob. It wasn’t meant to force him. Jacob loved her and she loved him, but they could never be together in America. If he would just consider—if she just got him to think a little differently about what it would be like to leave, then he would see. It was not perfectly honest to do, but she loved him, really loved him. She had felt sure he would understand, she had been sure he would understand. 

But he hadn’t understood. Once he they made it to Europe and he quite realized that she had—not manipulated, no, what a terrible word—

Grindelwald can’t read minds as easily as she can, she knows. He’s being careful or it would be uncomfortable. No, he’s not a natural, but he can hear enough for her to hear the echoes of her own memories in his thoughts. People are always easiest to read when they’re hurting, after all, and the truth is that she’d hurt Jacob, and that hurts her most of all.

“And what did your sister think? Nothing good, surely, not an auror dedicated to upholding the law.”

She hasn’t. Told her sister yet, exactly. She doesn’t want, oh, but she had known Tina wouldn’t have approved. She had known deep down it was really the wrong thing, but she’d never wanted anything in all her life like she wanted Jacob. Tina was always the career girl, the one with big dreams. Queenie just wanted had never wanted anything but a few friends and to not be dragged into people’s big expectations. But then she’d met Jacob and she just couldn’t, just didn’t…

“I can’t tell her,” she whispers, more tears welling in her eyes.  
“Why not? you just told a complete stranger."

Queenie’s face twists into a bitter grimace. She never was that good at keeping secrets, just a few, the ones that really matter. She doesn’t like to think how she’s admitted to a criminal a truth she wouldn’t tell her own sister, but in a way it makes perfect sense. He’s a violent revolutionary, not a typing pool gossip. It’s not like he’s going to tell Tina from halfway across the world, and she doesn’t care that much what he personally thinks.

“I should have told her.”  
“But you didn’t,” Grindelwald says. Queenie sniffs, wiping her eyes and hating herself. No, she didn’t, and look where it got them. 

“You didn’t tell her because she wouldn’t understand, would she?” Grindelwald says softly. “I should have told her,” Queenie repeats. 

Grindelwald is watching her with an odd look on his face. “And let her stop you? No, I think you might have been right. You didn’t follow the rules, but why follow bad rules? Why should anyone settle for the least bad choice?”

She blows her nose on the handkerchief. He sits forward in his chair and continues, “You had only bad options and you made yourself a better one. That makes you unusual, Miss Goldstein. You didn’t settle.”

“I made it worse,” she says thickly.  
“Perhaps you went about it the wrong,” he says slowly.  
“It was the wrong thing. I shouldn’t have done it. I hurt him and it’s all my fault he’s stuck here.”

Grindelwald’s tone is almost sympathetic. His eyes search hers. “You would never have gotten another chance if you hadn’t. MACUSA is not kind to those whose love it has forbidden. The entire world is not kind to people like you and Jacob.”

She had been sure she would never get another chance, but no, she should have left him at home.  
“Should you? Your Jacob might not be happy about it at the moment, but you have a chance now, don’t you? He’s away from MACUSA's laws now.”

Queenie is losing track of which words she’s said out loud and which responses Grindelwald has placed directly into her mind. She’s never had a real conversation with another legilimens before, not really, not someone this good at it, not for a long time. His emotions well up from somewhere deep, under the surface of his mind where she can sense but not comprehend them.

He says carefully, “People never do understand how much it hurts to be alone. Sometimes we have to try.”

In a flash of sudden clarity, she gets a real look at Grindelwald’s mind. He echoes one of her own thoughts, but it’s not just a reflection of her thought, it’s his entirely, shimmering with emotion and memory. This is what it feels like to love someone: I have never met anyone in the whole world like you. His full magical presence is overwhelming. Grindelwald’s mind brims with a memory: red-gold hair and vibrant blue eyes and the taste of lemon caramel, an old memory made knifelike with the pain of loss, and above all a person, that one wonderfully terribly important person, who is alive but rejected you so thoroughly it feels as though one of you has died—I have never met anyone in the whole world like you.

Grindelwald’s mind recedes abruptly back out of reach. Queenie gasps as his mind and magic withdraw, swaying in the gulf left behind. He may have let her hear some thoughts on purpose, but she is entirely certain he did not mean her to hear that much. She clings to the edge of the table and stares, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, into Grindelwald’s face.

He too watchers her, considering, almost guarded. Her ragged breathing sounds loud, echoing off the bare walls of of the little room. The silence seems to stretch a long time between them as her breathing returns to normal. His mind once again feels as smooth and featureless as glass. They both know she knows better; she ought to be afraid, because what if he kills her for the accidental invasion of privacy? But all she feels is sadness. She is sad for herself, sad for Jacob, and sad for whoever Grindelwald loves, because it seems he, too, has loved someone he lost. 

Finally, Grindelwald speaks again with his voice carefully neutral. “You tricked him,” he tells her slowly, “but you’ve given yourself a chance with him. He doesn’t hate you yet.” Grindelwald licks his lips and there is suppressed fire in his eyes. He leans forward and she can’t help leaning toward the intensity in his face. “Keep it that way,” he says.

He leans back in his chair and she feels as though a spell has been broken, some tension diffusing out of the room and leaving her cold. She struggles to regain her balance, and asks, “Does that mean you’re gonna to let both of us go?”

“If I let you go, you won’t really leave, will you?” he asks again, and this time Queenie shakes her head in answer, confirming what he’d guessed before. No, she will not leave without Jacob. Grindelwald tells her, “You’ll never be free. As long as he’s a muggle and you’re a witch, you’ll be stuck in between two places you can never belong.”

Queenie bites her lip, because what is she supposed to say to that? He sighs and pushes himself up out of his chair. “Wait!” Queenie exclaims. “What’re you gonna do?”

“I am going to have a talk with your Jacob.”  
“Please don’t hurt him,” she says immediately. Grindelwald shakes his head as he pushes in his chair. “Really, Miss Goldstein. I haven’t hurt you, have I?” He adds, “In the meantime, imagine how much easier it would be if you never had to hide in the first place. And please, do have something to drink.”

He waves his hand behind himself as he turns toward the door. The little room transfigures itself into something like a sitting room, with wallpaper and carpet and paintings on the walls. The pot of coffee and tea set on the table remain, plus new plate of cookies and tea sandwiches. She stares helplessly after him, not sure what to think or feel. He gives her and the little room a final weary glance and slips out the door, leaving Queenie sitting at the table, alone in the cell once more.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2018 Fantastic Beasts Calendar event on tumblr and ao3. Not sure I quite got across everything I wanted to do with this idea, but I hope you guys enjoy! Comments and keyboard mashing are always appreciated. c:


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